Biography

Engy is an applied microeconomist with interests in health and public economics. Her research focuses on the effect of changes in Medicare payments to hospitals on hospital spending on inpatient care and patient outcomes. Her recent work has analyzed the effects of the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP), which is a prominent Medicare Pay for Performance program that was introduced under the Affordable Care Act. Her work on the HRRP was funded by the National Institute of Health and Mathematica Policy Research. Engy is also interested in the longstanding question of whether additional healthcare spending on patients in the United States is productive. For example, she is currently studying a Medicare payment reform that allowed for higher Medicare payments for more severe patients. This research plans to assess the “real” and “accounting” consequences of this payment change. She received her PhD in Economics in 2018 from the University of Illinois at Chicago.